The Perspective

We live in an informative world where all amazing places have been seen in either a movie feature or in a documentary. And yet, we are all excited to go to those places and capture them with our camera.

The most interesting things to me are that in those great tourist spots, you always see the mob pulling out the cameras and proudly showing off the big zooms.

The tourist photographers will most likely take the same subject, from the same angle/location while still believing to capture a unique exposure because they change their focal length (playing with the zooms capability of their lens). But do they?

In the episode “How to choose your first lens” I mentioned the three categories and the two types of lenses:

• Wide angle – Normal – Telephoto
• Prime – Zoom

There is a simple fact in photography:

The perspective is only defined by the distance and angle between one’s camera and the subject.

No matter which camera, which lens*, which focal length, which photographer one is, all exposures of a given subject taken from a given location will have the same perspective.

*There is, however, one exception to this rule: A Tilt Shift lens. Such lens enables the photographer to change the image centre of the lens.